To what extent does the trajectory of relations between Jews and the Left in the world’s largest, contemporary, Jewish communities help us to understand current tensions between Jews in the UK and the British Labour Party, including allegations that the Labour Party is institutionally anti-Semitic?

Jack Jacobs is a professor of political science at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of On Socialists and “the Jewish Question” after Marx (1992), Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland (2009), and The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (2015), and is the editor of Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100 (2001) and of Jews and Leftist Politics, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.

Professor Jacobs was a Fulbright Scholar at Tel Aviv University in 1996-1997, and at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute in 2009. He served as a Visiting Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan in 2016, and, in 2018, as both a Visiting Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Research Fellow of the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, at the University of London.